JoyRun, Tapingo test college-campus appetite for food delivery

UC Davis sophomore Alli Rita and her boyfriend, Brijido Serros, make a food run for JoyRun, a new on-demand food delivery service starting out at college campuses.

UC Davis sophomore Alli Rita and her boyfriend, Brijido Serros,...

Does the world need another way to swipe your way to hot food? DoorDash, Postmates, Grubhub, Caviar, Yelp Eat24, UberEats and Amazon Restaurants already dispatch legions of couriers to pick up and deliver prepared meals from local restaurants.

But entrepreneurs still see an appetite for on-demand food. While Americans spend $500 billion a year at restaurants, including $210 billion in takeout food, just $11 billion goes to online food ordering, according to Morgan Stanley.

Now two Bay Area startups, Santa Clara’s JoyRun and San Francisco’s Tapingo, are offering new twists on food delivery. Both use college campuses as their testbeds — an approach famously pioneered by Facebook.

Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

JoyRun is trying to link food delivery to social networks.

JoyRun is trying to link food delivery to social networks.

Colleges’ dense campuses and captive audience of resident students, many of them without kitchens, create a natural environment for delivery services. “Colleges are a great breeding ground,” said Jeremiah Owyang, founder of Crowd Companies, an organization which helps large corporations become more innovative.

JoyRun is trying to link food delivery to social networks. It’s more akin to your college roommate telling you she’s off to pick up a sandwich and asking if you want anything. A similar kind of scenario at a JoyRun founder’s office inspired the company.

“The core idea is, everyone in the community helps each other,” said Manish Rathi, JoyRun’s chief executive officer. He co-founded the company with his wife, Shama Pagarkar, now the company’s product head, after she noticed how often her co-workers did food runs for one another.

JoyRun is now seeking to open on campuses nationwide after a year-long trial at about 50 colleges. Each campus will need 25 people to sign up to “unlock” the app. (Facebook employed a similar tactic of waiting for a critical mass of students to sign up before opening at a university.)

JoyRun lets users easily switch roles between ordering food and being the “runners” who pick it up. In startup parlance, it’s a peer-to-peer network. Runners can pick up food for free as a favor to friends (who in turn may reciprocate on the next run) or can charge up to $5 per person. The app includes a chat feature for runners and customers to communicate. People who order food can tip via the app or in cash. JoyRun takes a cut of the delivery fee. While JoyRun can pick up from any restaurant, it gets a percentage of the order amount when it has a partnership with a restaurant, essentially acting as its delivery service.

Owyang said JoyRun’s approach and social component are innovative. “Crowdsourcing multiple orders and getting people to chip in on them ties together ... on-demand food and group payment systems,” he said. JoyRun’s multiple orders also let couriers “make more money picking up more things.”

Jimmy Phu, owner of the Lazi Cow in Davis, which sells bubble tea, snacks and desserts, said JoyRun generates about $4,000 to $6,000 a month in business from UC Davis students on top of the restaurant’s existing $40,000 to $50,000 in sales. “That extra cushion pays my rent and helps me a lot,” he said. “I didn’t think they would bring in that much, but all their promotions and marketing really pays off.”

Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

Alli Rita and Brijido Serros make a food run for JoyRun, which lets users switch roles between ordering food and being the “runners” who pick it up.

Alli Rita and Brijido Serros make a food run for JoyRun, which lets...

Alli Rita, 20, a UC Davis sophomore, has been doing JoyRun deliveries for about a year. She does three or four “runs” per day, posting on the app that she’s about to go to Chipotle or Panda Express, for instance. She generally gets up to five customers per run, which typically takes 40 minutes to an hour, and makes $20 to $25, including tips. She hasn’t broken down how much she spends on gas and maintenance for her Mini Cooper, but said the restaurants are all just a few minutes from campus, while her customers meet her curbside for their orders.

Her boyfriend Brijido Serros also delivers for JoyRun, and they’ll coordinate their runs, with one picking up at McDonald’s and the other next door at Starbucks, for instance.

“It’s pretty much the perfect situation as a student for something that works with my schedule,” she said.

JoyRun last week said it has now raised $8.5 million on top of an initial $1.3 million in seed funding.

“We wake up latent demand and supply,” Rathi said. Or put less formally, “we drive ‘me too’ behavior” — meaning when someone hears that their roommate is getting Thai food, they want to get in on it.

Tapingo, a 3-year-old company with $60 million in venture capital backing and almost 100 employees, lets college students order food to pick up in a store, bypassing the line. That is available at almost 200 campuses. The company processes almost 100,000 orders a day.

“Pay in advance and pick up is a proven business model,” Owyang said. “Lots of retail stores and restaurants offer it.”

Tapingo added a delivery component at 50 schools and will expand that to 100 by fall. So far it has 10,000 students doing deliveries. It charges about $3 to $4 per order for delivery, and about 40 to 50 cents for pickup. Couriers make $10 an hour or more.

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“We become part of people’s daily lives, then we add on delivery,” said Jeff Hardy, Tapingo’s chief business officer. “Order-ahead-and-pick-up is a much higher engagement category than delivery. People do ordering ahead every day; delivery maybe once or twice a week.”

Tapingo integrates into on-campus food services so students can use the order-ahead feature with their meal plans. It has also partnered with food-service operators like Aramark and Sodexo which operate the dining programs for about 500 U.S. campuses. It will be the “mobile ordering partner” at those campuses within 12 to 18 months, the company said.

“Tapingo becomes a habitual buying process,” said Cameron McIntosh, a junior at the University of Kentucky, a 30,000-student school where Tapingo has been available since January. McIntosh likes that he can use his meal-plan dollars to pay for Tapingo at campus coffee shops and dining establishments.

Order pick-up has its own viral appeal, Hardy said. “If you’re waiting in a 10- or 15-minute line and see someone walk in and pick up their order without waiting, you start to ask, ‘How can I do that?’” he said.